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This 14-year-old made the best Facebook chat bot

February 18, 2017

It’s been nearly a year since Microsoft’s Satya Nadella proclaimed “bots are the new apps”. Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable – the vast majority of chat bots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken. But this week I was given great cause for optimism, in the form of Alec Jones, a 14-year-old from Victoria, Canada. For the past six months, Alec been working on Christopher Bot, a chat bot that helps students keep track of homework they’ve been given over the course of a week. To set things up, a student shares his or her schedule with Christopher Bot, and from then on it will send a quick message at the end of each lesson asking if any homework had been set. “Do you have homework for maths?” it asked 30-year-old me pretending to be a child for the sake of this piece. “Yes!” I replied. “Your teacher needs to chill out on the homework,” came the auto-response, adding, “what homework do you have?” “Algebra :-(” “Ok, got it.” Image caption The chat bot takes answers in from messages and adds it to a homework schedule Through this interface, I’m able easily insert “algebra” – urgh – into a weekly schedule that I can then refer back to at any point to see what I need to get done. Once I complete a piece of homework, I tell Christopher Bot, and it congratulates…more detail

When Mark Zuckerberg decided to sue hundreds of Hawaiians with ownership rights to small parts of his Kauai estate, he ignited a firestorm of backlash. Now the Facebook billionaire’s neighbours plan to march in protest this weekend at the six-foot wall he erected last year along Koolau Road, according to the march’s organiser, Joe Hart. In an interview with Business Insider on Thursday, Hart said he expected at least 200 locals, including several who Zuckerberg has filed lawsuits against, to participate in the march this Saturday. “People are furious down here with him,” said Hart, a local hibiscus farmer who…... [read more]

Remember the time (actually only last April) when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Live and paid 140 or so media companies around the world some $50m to provide video coverage that made Live live. Ah! welcome to the surging, dominant video age. Except that now the major news analytics player, parse.ly, has just concluded that audiences spent 30% less time engaging with online video, on average, then they did with short, medium and lengthy text posts. And engagement, of course, is supposedly the crucial thing, the gold standard measure of involvement and commitment. Facebook (the Poynter Institute reports) isn’t renewing those…... [read more]

Arielle Zuckerberg: Trump may discourage minority techies Forget Siri. When Mark Zuckerberg wants an AI assistant, he recruits the "Voice of God." The Facebook (FB, Tech30) CEO and cofounder posted a video teasing an artificial intelligence application on Tuesday that he built for his home, voiced by none other than actor Morgan Freeman. In October, Zuckerberg asked his followers for suggestions to be the voice for Jarvis, his AI tool inspired by Iron Man. Freeman was a top pick. Zuckerberg personally called Freeman to ask him to do it. Robert Downey Jr. had also offered his services. Like Amazon (AMZN,…... [read more]

BREAKING: the internet. In the seven days it has taken the world to digest the results of one of the closest - and most controversial - American elections of all time, the blame game has begun. And for many of those seeking to understand, explain or excuse Donald Trump's win, the answer is simple: it was all Facebook's fault. Let's look at the evidence. Facebook has said in the past that some of the news on it is fake, Trump himself hailed the power of Facebook after his victory, and Clinton's campaign called out the social network after their loss,…... [read more]

Until recently, virtual reality had been something of a fantasy for storytellers and technologists. As long ago as 1935, American science fiction writer Stanley G Weinbaum described something like virtual reality in a short story called Pygmalion’s Spectacles. “But listen – a movie that gives one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you…... [read more]

SAN FRANCISCO — When Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to talk video first, he means first. At the top of the third-quarter earnings call with analysts on Wednesday, Zuckerberg wasted little time getting to the point. "I want to start by talking about our work around putting video first across our apps," he said. Time and again throughout the call, Zuckerberg drew attention to Facebook's company-wide push to become "video first." Zuckerberg believes that within five years most of what people consume online will be video, subsuming words and photographs. And he's determined to catch this next big content wave…... [read more]

When Mark Zuckerberg defended board member Peter Thiel’s $1.25m donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this week, the Facebook CEO emphasized that support of the candidate did not necessarily constitute “accepting sexual assault”. But part of Thiel’s 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus suggests that he may sympathize more with Trump – who has recently been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by several women – than with his victims. The PayPal co-founder attempted to discredit the idea of date rape – he wrote that the definition of rape had been erroneously expanded to include…... [read more]

Open your Facebook feed. What do you see? A photo of a close friend’s child. An automatically generated slide show commemorating six years of friendship between two acquaintances. An eerily on-target ad for something you’ve been meaning to buy. A funny video. A sad video. A recently live video. Lots of video; more video than you remember from before. A somewhat less-on-target ad. Someone you saw yesterday feeling blessed. Someone you haven’t seen in 10 years feeling worried. And then: A family member who loves politics asking, “Is this really who we want to be president?” A co-worker, whom you’ve…... [read more]

When Mark Zuckerberg challenged Neymar to a keepy-uppy challenge most of us were like 'Pfft, good luck Mark". But it turned out the Facebook guru actually meant the challenge to be taken on his company's new Messenger keepy-uppy game. Which does level the playing field somewhat. First unveiled last month, to celebrate the start of the Euros , the game requires users to keep a football up in the air by tapping on their smartphone screen. It may seem simple, but it gets harder. After 10 successful taps it will start throwing in distractions to make it more difficult. Zuckerberg,…... [read more]

In the quaint steam age of Mark Twain it was the case, as the writer allegedly noted, that: “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. Owing to significant changes in the media landscape since 1900, the same lie can now circumnavigate the globe, get a million followers on Snapchat and reverse 60 years of political progress while the truth is snoozing in a Xanax-induced coma, eyeshade on, earplugs in. Modern truth is not just outpaced by fiction, it can be bypassed altogether as part of a sound political strategy or as…... [read more]